President Joe Biden has appointed key individuals to serve as key leaders in his administration in the United States.
Bryan David Hunt, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Sierra Leone while Felix Sanchez, Nominee for Member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Bryan Hunt is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, class of Minister Counselor. He currently serves as the Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the United States Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.
Prior to that, Hunt served as Director of the Office of South Sudan and Sudan in the Bureau of African Affairs in the Department of State.
Hunt also served as the State Department’s Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Africa and the Sudans. Earlier, Hunt was the Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassies in Maputo, Mozambique, Georgetown, Guyana, and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
He has also served as Consul General and Principal Officer of the U.S. Consulate General in Lahore as well as Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. Hunt also held assignments as Deputy Director for Regional Affairs, in the Africa Bureau’s Office of Regional and Security Affairs and as the Bureau’s Desk Officer for Angola in addition to Togo, Benin, and Cote d’Ivoire. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from American University in Washington D.C. and speaks Portuguese, German, and Urdu.
Felix Sanchez, Nominee for Member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Felix R. Sanchez is a nationally recognized media and communications expert and Chairman of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts.
Launched in 1997 by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, the foundation’s mission is to advance the presence of Latinos in the entertainment industry. Sanchez has fought against Latino exclusion in entertainment throughout his career.
Most notably, his advocacy spurred institutional change at the Kennedy Center Honors, resulting in greater acknowledgement of meritorious Latino/a cultural icon.
Sanchez has devised many pipeline programs for Latino/a graduate student studying theater and film at NYU, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, USC, UCLA, and UT Austin. His work on these issues has been honored with the Ohtlí Award, Mexico’s highest national honor bestowed on Latino/a philanthropy leader.
Sanchez, a native San Antonian, moved to Washington, D.C. to serve as a Legislative Assistant to then-U.S. Senator Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. In 1988, he was named National Deputy Campaign Manager for the Paul Simon for Presidential campaign.
After joining the Dukakis-Bentsen campaign, Sanchez pioneered the first Latino “Celebrity Fly-around” outreach strategy to activate the Latino Democratic base. He has since served in this role for several other Democratic presidential campaigns.
Sanchez received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and his J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. His daughter Isabella, graduated summa cum laude from Boston University, while his son, First Lieutenant Phil Sanchez, graduated from West Point in 2020.
